As for Browning’s love towards his wife, nothing more tender and chivalrous has ever been told of ideal lovers in an ideal romance.  It is so beautiful a story that one often prefers it to the sweetest or loftiest poem that came from the lips of either.  That love knew no soilure in the passage of the years.  Like the flame of oriental legend, it was perennially incandescent though fed not otherwise than by sunlight and moonshine.  If it alone survive, it may resolve the poetic fame of either into one imperishable, luminous ray of white light:  as the uttered song fused in the deathless passion of Sappho gleams star-like down the centuries from the high steep of Leucadoe.

It was here, in Pisa, I have been told on indubitable authority, that Browning first saw in manuscript those “Sonnets from the Portuguese” which no poet of Portugal had ever written, which no man could have written, which no other woman than his wife could have composed.  From the time when it had first dawned upon her that love was to be hers, and that the laurel of poetry was not to be her sole coronal, she had found expression for her exquisite trouble in these short poems, which she thinly disguised from ‘inner publicity’ when she issued them as “from the Portuguese.”

It is pleasant to think of the shy delight with which the delicate, flower-like, almost ethereal poet-wife, in those memorable Pisan evenings—­with the wind blowing soundingly from the hills of Carrara, or quiescent in a deep autumnal calm broken only by the slow wash of Arno along the sea-mossed long-deserted quays—­showed her love-poems to her husband.  With what love and pride he must have read those outpourings of the most sensitive and beautiful nature he had ever met, vials of lovely thought and lovelier emotion, all stored against the coming of a golden day.

     “How do I love thee?  Let me count the ways. 
      I love thee to the depth and breadth and height
      My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight
      For the ends of Being and ideal Grace. 
      I love thee to the level of every day’s
      Most quiet need, by sun and candle light. 
      I love thee freely, as men strive for Right;
      I love thee purely, as they turn from Praise. 
      I love thee with the passion put to use
      In my old griefs, and with my childhood’s faith. 
      I love thee with a love I seemed to lose
      With my lost saints,—­I love thee with the breath,
      Smiles, tears, of all my life!—­and, if God choose,
      I shall but love thee better after Death!”

Even such heart-music as this cannot have thrilled him more than these two exquisite lines, with their truth almost too poignant to permit of serene joy—­

     “I yield the grave for thy sake, and exchange
      My near sweet view of heaven for earth with thee!”